Is Trumpism coming to Australia?

 

Over the last few decades, Australian politics seems to have become more like that of the United States. Politics in this country was once several degrees to the left of America, with the Labor party advocating socialism – and proposing extensive government ownership of business enterprises. However, in both countries the progressive side of politics is now focused on an environmental and affirmative action agenda, while the conservative side seeks to moderate those tendencies. Both sides seek to appeal, in different ways, to aspirations of people for higher material standards of living.

That was how it was before Trumpism came to America. Viewed from this side of the Pacific, American politics seems to have taken a bizarre twist. Given that Australians tend to follow social and political trends in America, does that mean we are also destined to experience Trumpism?

Before attempting to answer that question, it seems important to clarify the nature of Trumpism.

Trumpism

Salvatore Babones, an American sociologist now living in Australia, published a book a couple of years ago which sheds light on the nature of Trumpism. In his book, The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts, Salvatore argues that Trump is a populist rather than an authoritarian leader and that Americans have more to fear from the tyranny of experts. He suggests that twenty-first-century democracy is endangered by the tendency of the expert class to dismiss the moral right of less-educated people to have opinions that conflict with their own.

Salvatore makes the point that populism and authoritarianism are polar opposite strategies for political legitimation:

“Populists appeal to the innate common sense of ordinary people, while authoritarians appeal to tradition and the prestige of established institutions”.

Salvatore is not particularly flattering to former President Trump. He refers to Trump as a narcissist, in making the point that “you can’t be an authoritarian when the only authority you recognize is yourself”. He also refers to Trump as “a paranoid populist with a persecution complex”.

Salvatore claimed, “Trump will never be a hero to anyone but himself”. That assessment now seems to have been wide of the mark in the light of the extent of ongoing support for Trump, despite his unwillingness to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election. Trump now commands a sizeable support base of people who love him, view him as a source of truth and wisdom, and seek to please him. Trumpism seems to have developed into a personality cult, in some respects like Peronism.

It is important to remember that, like members of other cults, Trumpists are guided by moral impulses. They may be misguided, but most of them are good people.

The development of the Trump cult seems to be partly attributable to echo chambers in the social media (discussed here) but I think it is more strongly attributable to demonization of Trump within mainstream media. Trump attracted populist support by attacking the consensus wisdom of the expert class and disparaging anyone who disagreed with him. His opponents responded in kind by suggesting he is as an ignorant buffoon, bully, and admirer of tyrants. Trump’s strongest supporters have come to love him because they think he is unfairly maligned for expressing views they endorse.

The strength of the Trump cult is evident in its impact on the behavior of many conservative politicians. Until recently, American conservatives have had a well-deserved reputation of being principled supporters of the U.S. Constitution and the federal system of government. Nevertheless, many leading conservatives, who have hitherto been opponents of judicial activism, supported the unsuccessful efforts of Texas to have the Supreme Court overturn the presidential election results of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, on the grounds of procedural irregularities.

If those efforts had succeeded, the implications would have been far-reaching. John Yoo, an American legal scholar, has noted that “under Texas’s theory, any state could have sued any other in any presidential or federal midterm election over irregular procedures”. If the Supreme Court justices had been inclined to put political loyalties above legal principle, they would have undermined the federalism that is integral to the process of electing American presidents.

The strength of the Trump cult is also evident in the efforts of some conservative politicians in challenging the Electoral College votes when they were formally opened before a joint session of both housed of Congress on January 6. Those antics had no chance of succeeding. They only make sense in terms of pandering to Trump and his support base.

It is evident that Trump’s bizarre behavior following the election has opened up a deep rift within the Republican party between those who have regard to the Constitution and the conventions associated with orderly transfer of power following elections, and those who set no limit to the lengths they would go in pandering to the Trump cult. At the forefront of the first category is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who supported Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results, but recognized Joe Biden as President-elect after the Electoral College confirmed that he had won the election. The latter category includes Senator Ted Cruz, who apparently still has presidential aspirations.

Looking ahead, an association with Trump and his support base is likely to be an ongoing electoral liability for the Republican party. Trump’s ability to get his supporters to cast a vote is more than offset by his apparent inability to avoid provoking other people to vote against him. Conservative politicians who oppose Trump will continue to be punished by the Trump cult.

The electoral future for the Republicans seems no more promising even if Trump leaves to form his own Patriots party. His electoral support is likely to be great enough to enable him to split the conservative vote and enable Democrats to win more contests.

Could a conservative populist wreak havoc in Australian politics?

I don’t think it would make sense to argue that Australians differ from Americans in fundamental ways that would make it impossible for something like Trumpism to happen here. I don’t have data on this, but it would not surprise me if the proportion of the population who think expert policy advisors ad career politicians have too much influence on government is as high in Australia as it is in America.

Over the years, a substantial number of Australian politicians have advanced their careers by thumbing their noses at the “ruling class” of politicians and expert policy advisors. It would not be beyond the realm of possibility for a person with such views to become prime minister of Australia. As I noted several years ago, former prime minister, John Howard was viewed as an outsider by the ruling class of policy advisors in Canberra. However, Howard was a career politician and could not be described as a populist.

The important point to note is that if a Trump-like populist was elected prime minister of Australia, she or he would not last more than a few months with popularity ratings as low as those of Donald Trump throughout most of his presidency. Australian prime ministers are elected by parliamentarians, and do not last long if they appear incapable of winning the next election. It is a desirable attribute of the conservative side of Australian politics that parliamentarians are able to change their leader as frequently as they wish, until they find one that voters think might be worthy of the role of prime minister for more than a few months.

Bottom line

Australia is fairly safe from Trumpism unless it becomes a republic, with an elected presidency like that in the United States. Recent events in the United States have convinced me that Australians would be wise to vote against any proposal to become a republic with an elected head of state.

Seasons Greetings!

 I wish you a Merry Christmas and/ or happy celebrations of whatever it is you celebrate at this time of the year. (If you are not in the mood for celebrations, you might feel better if you count your blessings.) Happy New Year!

Normal blogging will resume in a few weeks.

In case you are wondering, I have not run out of questions to explore and write about. I have taken a break from blogging to devote my time to putting the finishing touches on my new book: Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing. I will tell you more about that later.

Have we got the balance right between freedom and protecting the vulnerable?

 

It is appropriate to be thinking seriously about the question posed above during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The extent to which it is appropriate for personal freedom to be sacrificed to protect the vulnerable depends on context. The consequences of viewing either freedom or protecting the vulnerable to have priority depend on the prevalence of the virus in different communities and on the means available to protect vulnerable people who are unable to self-isolate. Personal values are also involved; the responses suggested by public health officials are not always in harmony with the values of ordinary people.

Some people see no trade-off between freedom and protecting the vulnerable. At one end of the spectrum, one group in that category considers that personal freedom always trumps all other considerations, irrespective of context. At the other end of the spectrum, a different group argues that eliminating the virus trumps all other considerations – they suggest that we cannot protect the vulnerable or enjoy much freedom unless we eliminate the virus.

My response to those who argue that personal freedom always trumps all other considerations is that they should consider Friedrich Hayek’s observation that the norms of just conduct that evolved to protect the private domains of individuals (life, liberty and property) tend to change somewhat depending on context. There may be good reasons for the private domains of individuals to be defined differently during the extraordinary circumstances of a war or famine. Similarly, behaviour that is appropriately held to be wholly in the private domain of individuals can become problematic during a pandemic. For example, it is appropriate for norms regarding physical distancing to have changed to reduce infection risks for vulnerable people.

My response to those who claim that elimination of the virus should trump all other considerations is to point to the futility of attempting to achieve that objective. Outbreaks have continued to occur even in isolated communities where there have been no known active cases for months (e.g. New Zealand). It is unlikely that the virus will ever be eliminated, even if an effective vaccine becomes widely available. An ongoing suppression strategy inevitably requires ongoing restrictions on personal freedom, so trade-offs are inevitable.

Different strategies for protecting the vulnerable have different implications for personal freedom, and hence different consequences for psychological health and livelihoods. The broad choice is between focused measures aimed at protecting members of vulnerable groups (e.g. people in nursing homes) and general measures aimed at reducing community transmission. Focused measures involve some restrictions on freedom (e.g. restricted conditions for visiting family members in nursing homes) but attempting to achieve similar protection via general measures to reduce community transmission involves much greater restrictions of freedom.

There seems to have been a general tendency to use a combination of focused and general measures in most parts of the world. That may make sense in communities where the number of active cases of infection is rising rapidly, but involves excessive restriction of freedom where the number of cases in low and relatively stable.

Back in March, I argued that a period of lock-down was warranted in Australia to buy time to help cope with an expected influx of hospital patients, and to put testing arrangements in place to enable infectious people to be quarantined. That was a common view at the time, and similar reasoning was used by federal and state governments to justify lock-downs. The lock-downs were introduced following large scale voluntary self-isolation and shut-downs of businesses whose customers were staying home.

However, the strategy had unintended consequences. The combination of self-isolation, shut-downs and lock-downs worked so well to suppress virus transmission that some state governments shifted the goal posts. They closed state borders in an apparent attempt to eliminate the virus within their states.

Subsequently, the government of Victoria responded to a second-wave virus outbreak by adopting an obsessive suppression strategy to reduce transmission rates. A severe lock-down was introduced, placing the residents of Melbourne in virtual home detention for several months.

There is little doubt that the Victorian lock-down reduced transmission rates to a greater extent than would otherwise have occurred, but the burden imposed on Victorians seems to have been excessive. A more focused approach could have protected the vulnerable with less loss of freedom to the rest of the Melbourne community.

Perhaps the severe approach adopted will enable Victorians to travel interstate sooner than would otherwise be possible. However, like people in New South Wales, they still have little chance of visiting Western Australia over the next few months, and would be wise to exercise extreme care in making plans to travel to Queensland.

The federal government’s provision of additional assistance to unemployed people and businesses reduced the human misery that would otherwise have accompanied the restrictions on personal freedom imposed by state governments. As noted earlier, those restrictions include closure of state borders, which has been detrimental to tourism. It seems unlikely that such stringent measures would have been introduced if the state governments had to fund associated additional welfare payments from their own coffers.

The objective of governments in Australia – federal and state - now seems to be to get to “COVID-Normal”. That involves ongoing restrictions on large gatherings, distancing rules, sign-in rules for pubs and restaurants, and constant hectoring by politicians and public health officials about the need for vigilance. There are plans to reduce some restrictions on interstate travel, and there is talk of allowing international travel to and from a few countries with similarly low infection rates. However, a return to normal international travel to and from Australia looks to be a long way away. 

Getting to COVID-Normal, means that Australians will be continuing to live in La La Land. For the next few months, we will congratulate ourselves about the amount of personal freedom that we enjoy relative to people in the United States and Europe, where infection rates are much higher. However, I doubt that there will be as much self-congratulation in 12 month time.

At some stage Australians will need to think seriously about how we can make the transition from COVID-Normal to living in the real world. What could be done to enable that to happen within the next 12 months?

There are grounds to hope that an effective vaccine will begin to become available within a few months, but under current government policies that seems unlikely to enable life to return to normal within a reasonable time frame. An effective vaccine could enable those most vulnerable to the virus to be protected early next year, and hence may offer potential for life to get back to normal without much delay. However, effective protection of the most vulnerable seems unlikely to be sufficient to persuade state government health departments to let go of their single-minded suppression strategies. Given the climate of fear state health officials have helped to generate, consideration of personal career interests (ass protection) will continue to make them more concerned about potential COVID-19 outbreaks than about other factors affecting the health and wellbeing of citizens. For similar reasons, State premiers can be expected to continue to hide behind the advice of public health officials, rather than to make balanced decisions to protect livelihoods as well as lives.

It seems to me that Australians should be giving serious consideration to the approach advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) of a group of infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists. The GBD advocates focused protection of those most vulnerable, whilst allowing the rest of the community to live their lives normally and to build up immunity through natural infection.

The GBD approach offers the best hope we have of life returning to normal in a reasonable time frame. If we do not get an effective vaccine or treatment, natural immunity offers the only hope that life can ever return to normal. If an effective vaccine or treatment becomes available over the next few months, that will remove most of the risks associated with the GBD approach. As I see it, there is no good reason why life in Australia should not return to normal very soon after vulnerable people have been offered the protection of a vaccine.

Can kindness be made powerful without being lost?

 

People who read Vasily Grossman’s book, Life and Fate, are not likely to forget the experience. That is not just because the book takes a long time to read, and is not easy to put aside once one has begun reading. Grossman provides memorable insights into the good and evil in human nature, by depicting horrifying events in the former Soviet Union during the Second World War through the eyes of the characters in his book.

In writing the book, Grossman drew extensively on his experience as a war correspondent with the Red Army in the battle for Stalingrad. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 made it seem possible to the author that views critical of the Stalinism could be published in a novel.  Life and Fate was completed in 1960, but its publication was suppressed because it suggests that the the Soviet regime was as inhumane as the Nazi regime. The manuscript was smuggled to the West some years after Grossman’s death in 1964, but was not published until 1980.

In this post I want to focus on Grossman’s view of kindness. Readers looking for more comprehensive reviews might be interested in those by Linda Grant, Robert Chandler, and Gideon Rachman. Rachman’s view is particularly interesting. He suggests that the book has contemporary relevance because political ideas that emphasize group identity seem to be coming back into fashion.

The most explicit view of kindness in the book is in its account of the scribblings of Ikonnikov-Morzh, an inmate in a German concentration camp. Ikonnikov followed the teachings of Tolstoy as a young man and joined a peasant commune after the Bolshevik revolution. Subsequently, his enthusiasm for communist agricultural policies was destroyed by the horrific implementation of collectivisation. Mostovskoy, an old Bolshevik who was also in the camp, concluded that Ikonnikov was unhinged, after he read his scribblings. Liss, the SS representative on the camp administration, told Mostovskoy: “You and I can feel only disgust at what’s written here. We two stand shoulder to shoulder against trash like this.”

Ikonnikov begins his tract by asking whether people have advanced over the millennia in their concept of “good”. He observes that over the centuries much blood was spilt as a diversity of concepts of good came into existence, corresponding to different sects, races and classes. The essence of his argument is that people struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good:

“They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good. And so the good of a sect, class, nation or State assumes a specious universality in order to justify its struggle against an apparent evil”.

Ikonnikov describes how collectivisation of agriculture resulted in many people being annihilated “in the name of an idea of good” that he suggests was “as fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity”. He goes on to suggest that even the horrific crime of the Nazis were committed in the name of good.

He concludes that good is actually to be found in the everyday kindness of ordinary people, which he describes as senseless, wordless and instinctive. He gives an example of a woman who was unable to explain her acts of kindness to an injured enemy soldier.

Ikonnikov argues that it is not possible to make kindness powerful without losing it. He claims that when Christianity clothed kindness in the teachings of the Church Fathers, “it began to fade; its kernel became a husk”.

The tract ends with the passage quoted at the beginning of this post.

The question remains of whether Ikonnikov is right in claiming that kindness cannot be made powerful without being lost.

To answer that question, we need to consider what it means to make kindness powerful. Kindness does seem to be more prevalent in communities where people interact voluntarily for mutual benefit. In such communities, perhaps kindness is powerful because people tend to see acts of kindness as an example that they would like to follow.  

However, Ikonnikov seems to have had a different kind of power in mind in considering what it means for kindness to be made powerful. People representing sects, races and classes may set out with kindness in their hearts to seek to use coercive powers in support of their goals. I agree that the exercise of that kind of power tends to end up as unkind to people who are not members of those groups.